Our guest speaker for September is Karin Cather of Karin Cather Editorial Services.

The meeting will start at 1pm on 11 September. It is open to the public, and you can join via this link:
https://teenenrichmentnetwork.my.webex.com/meet/teenenrichment

About the Topic

This talk is about the misconceptions that authors may have about how trials and sentencings work. While you can take some liberties with the truth, the audiences are more sophisticated today. This presentation will cover some of the mechanics of what happens in a state criminal trial and sentencing to help you write these elements of the book with more verisimilitude so that your audience in the criminal justice system won’t savage your book in reviews.

It used to be that authors could get away with writing trials wrong because readers didn’t know any better. There’s a certain amount of liberty that you can take as an author with the facts, but the more you do so, the more credibility you lose. The scope of this talk confines itself to trial and sentencing.

About the Speaker

Karin Cather is a former trial lawyer with 13 years of experience as a prosecutor and four years of experience as a child welfare attorney. As a hands-on prosecutor, she  didn’t just take cases to trial, but also accompanied police on search warrants, observed autopsies, and been to countless crime scenes. 

In addition to her professional background, she also has a black belt in a form of Krav Maga that involves simulation drills—including fist-fights, firearms and firearms defense, knife defense, defense against blunt instruments, ground defense, attacks against multiple opponents, and de-escalation drills—in simulated streets, alleys, cars, airplanes, restaurants, and offices. . This gives her the background to assess the realism of violence and fight scenes, including fistfights, ground fights, knife attacks, and gunfights.

When her disabled child’s needs escalated in 2013, she left the practice of law and switched to editing.